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Wattpad Frustration

Wattpad seems to be experiencing issues.

I’d like to be able to report that all is well with Wattpad, and a couple days ago I would have said just that. The number of reads for each new posting were higher than the previous posting. That seemed counterintuitive to me, but somehow people were finding more story. No complaints.

All that ended on Thursday. The story I posted on Thursday received 20 something reads compared to 140 for the previous installment, and that despite more retweets of the Twitter announcement than any other installment so far.

I let it sit for a couple days, feeling that Wattpad would eventually sort itself out.

Other anomalies have occurred while I’ve been Wattpad. For instance, about a week ago, all the most popular books dropped off the Fantasy genre hot list for several hours to be replaced by books with much less popularity. The same happened for some other genres. At that time, my book moved into the 300s in the rankings. Once things were restored to order, my book landed back at #807 where it had been before and where it remains.

Today there still hadn’t been much of an improvement in the number of reads. It made no sense that the story just stopped garnering reads.

Then I noticed that all the tags had been removedfrom my story. While that may not seem like a significant problem, many of the search functions in Wattpad rely on tags. Without them, there was little chance that the story would be seen by anyone other my followers. The silver lining in all this is that I now understand a little better how readers find my story on Wattpad.

The user interface on Wattpad also received a reworking in the past few days.Maybe that has something to do with all the flukiness I’ve seen recently. I can’t imagine how that could cause the missing tags. However, if you are an author on Wattpad, you should check to make sure your story still has any tags you set up.

The biggest frustration has been finding announcements from Wattpad of any problems on the site.I’ve checked the clubs, the help pages on the website, the blog, the Wattpad Twitter feed, and Facebook. It seems that Wattpad very rarely communicates with its users about problems. A notice saying that they are resolving issues would have gone a long way to allay my concerns. Absent that, a forum where interface and server issues are discussed could help. If you know of such a place that I overlooked, please let me know in the comments.